MCCHE Precision Convergence Webinar Series with Dr. Satrajit Ghosh
Leveraging brain research to change scientific culture, education, and infrastructure
Dr. Satrajit Ghosh
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
With a high-level panel of leaders in science, technology, on-the-ground action, investment, and policy
The advent and pervasive use of smartphones, wearables, and connected devices together with significant advances in neurotechnology and computation offer a unique opportunity to understand phenotypic variation in a large population. We can track individuals longitudinally, relate these data to life and clinical outcomes, and potentially intervene or nudge. Actualizing this vision and painting a comprehensive picture of an individual requires solving problems in dealing with data integration, improving neuroscientific understanding, developing new algorithms and models, and reasoning with information. In this talk, I will use several ongoing projects from our group to illustrate progress towards this complex system that will cover translational applications of human communication, machine learning technologies for precision psychiatry and medicine, and infrastructure solutions to preserve information and accelerate collaboration for knowledge generation. Doing this work has come with the significant acknowledgment of the gaps in our individual training and how to overcome these deficits and increase our knowledge through communities of practice, through shared data and resources, and through better research infrastructure.
About the speaker
Satrajit Ghosh is a Principal Research Scientist at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and an Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School. He is a computer scientist and computational neuroscientist by training. He directs the Senseable Intelligence Group whose research portfolio comprises projects on spoken communication, brain imaging, and informatics to address gaps in scientific knowledge in three areas: the neural basis and translational applications of human spoken communication, machine learning approaches to precision psychiatry and medicine, and preserving information for reproducible research and knowledge genera-tion. He is a co-PI of the DANDI project, a BRAIN Initiative archive for cellular neurophysiology. He is a member of the scientific steering committees of Neurodata Without Borders, the Allen Institute OpenScope project, and the Healthy Brain and Cognitive Development study. He directs Openmind, the neuroscience computing cluster at MIT that serves about 30 PIs and 600 users. He was one of the lead architects of Nipype, a workflow platform that supports the neuroimaging com-munity.
About the series
The Precision Convergence series is launched to catalyze unique synergy between, on the one hand, novel partnerships across sciences, sectors and jurisdictions around targeted domains of real-world solutions, and on the other hand, a next generation convergence of AI with advanced research computing and other data and digital architectures such as PSC’s Bridges-2, and supporting data sharing frameworks such as HuBMAP, informing in a real time as possible the design, deployment and monitoring of solutions for adaptive real-world behavior and context.
The Precision Convergence Webinar Series is co-hosted by The McGill Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics (MCCHE) at McGill University and The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, a joint computational research center between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.